Charles Kettering, an American engineer whose 140 patents included the electric starter, car lighting and ignition systems. Later had the General Motors Institute named after him (now Kettering University). Vice president and director of research for General Motors Corp. (1920-47).

Are robots going mainstream? At $285K per robot, probably not. But it’s a good step forward. Dave is building a Microbric robot at home for fun.

anyone who thinks that the fucking bombsquad cannot recognize a box of leds when they see one, is extremely naive and apparently uninformed.

there was no mistake, and everyone should think really hard about why these things are really happening.

again, if you believe these people who need knowledge of electronics for the reason of not getting killed by them will not recognize a box of leds when they see one, you really ought to stop sniffing wood polish…

This has promise. i guess it wouldn’t work so well on my HTC Dream (G1). I’ve been trying to think of good electronics mobile apps but i didn’t come up with anything good. On the ham side of things i did download a morse code reader. It seems to only really work on amplitude. I would be better if it filtered for frequency as well. When i hold it up to the radio, the morse tones dip into the static noise.

The ADE651 or GT200 or whatever it’s called now is a great detector. Not for bombs but for corruption. Apparently there are large kickbacks in the purchasing process. I don’t think people are stupid to buy them cause they think they are working, but motivated by the bonuses they get paid back from the producer.

If everyone wants to move to a city or attend a certain school, that’s a good thing. It will inspire people to create more of the same, since creating something good makes everyone want it which makes it expensive.

I also agree with the green card. There’s room for debate about how many foreigners we let it, but it seems like letting them in on a visa that can have them sent home on a week’s notice is a bad policy. It’s difficult for the foreigner worker, and it creates opportunities for abuse.

I don’t know if I’m late to the game with this, but everytime I see a story about hobbyist electronics causing an over-reaction among law enforcement, my first thought is “yeah, I could make that blow up.”

Granted, my background is pretty uncommon, but I haven’t seen any hobbyist electronic project that has been stoppped by security that I couldn’t build an identical device with a bomb in it.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that we’re not over reacting in a lot of these cases, but I don’t think the issue is as cut and dried as some would like to believe.